At Worcester Art Museum, an exhibit that's out of this world

A woman looks at "Carina Nebula," a large print by artist Michael Benson, at the Worcester Art Museum on Sunday.Benson's creation will be on display until June 22.

WORCESTER — Photographer, filmmaker and writer Michael Benson said the marriage of the telescope and the camera in the late 1800s opened up new avenues for discovery in the universe.

Mr. Benson's 8-foot-by-4-foot chromogenic print, "Carina Nebula," which is featured until June 22 in the Jeppson Idea Lab at the Worcester Art Museum, attempts to make space visually and conceptually accessible through a photographic image created from myriad telescope data files.

It's a lot to wrap your mind around but it provides almost a spacecraft view of moments in the universe, compressed into one image.

"Our question is, When is data art?" Katrina Stacy, assistant curator of education, said about the installation.

Mr. Benson gave a lecture about his work Sunday to a museum audience of some 60 people.

The Carina Nebula, an area of space about 10,000 light years away, is among the brightest parts of the Milky Way visible from Earth.

It is an area teeming with new and dying stars — clouds of dust and gas, eroding dust pillars sculpted by radiation from powerful stars and lobes of interstellar material, according to exhibit information.

The nebula itself is hundreds of light years across.

"That's a staggering volume of space and time to try to collapse in a photograph," Mr. Benson said.

He created this image in 2008 by stitching together a mosaic of data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Hubble telescope with files from the European Southern Observatory 2.2- meter telescope in La Silla, Chile.

The lower-resolution Earth-based telescopes replace the "false-color" information of the original Hubble images, which are from wavelengths beyond what the human eye perceives, with "true-color" data from the visible-light wavelength.

Mr. Benson said, "It's true color in a kind of fictional way."

Within the Carina Nebula print, which represents just a segment of 50 light years across its width, one can see signs of emerging solar systems. It's the universe in action.

Mr. Benson is based in New York City but since September he's lived in Somerville, while he works on a project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Although he wasn't formally trained as a scientist, Mr. Benson, who has written and made films about a wide range of subjects including rock 'n' roll, said that as a science writer, he absorbs what's going on.

His science articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine and The New York Times, among other publications.

"I've been a space cadet since I was a little kid," Mr. Benson, 51, said.

"My mom took me to see '2001: A Space Odyssey,' when I was 6."

He has been hooked ever since.

In the late 1990s, with the arrival of the Web and the availability of NASA data formerly accessible primarily to universities and government agencies, Mr. Benson said, "I discovered I could engage in self-directed journeys of space exploration."

NASA's troves of data and its open availability policy are a boon to both scientists and artists, according to Mr. Benson.

"Planetary scientists ... go into these archives seeking data to support their theories," he said. "I'm essentially looking for aesthetic discoveries in the same archive that scientists use to make scientific discoveries."

After creating an image of a geyser erupting from one of the moons of Saturn, using digital transmissions from the Cassini spacecraft probe, Mr. Benson said: "I realized, my God, I'm probably the first person ... to see it the way we would see it in a spacecraft."

The image of water shooting from the moon Enceladus appears in his book, "Planetfall: New Solar System Visions" (Abrams, October 2012).

He added, "It can be revelatory in the most profound sense."

Mr. Benson might be using the latest telescopic and digital imaging techniques, but it's not the first time scientists looking at the sky have been the catalyst for art.

The swirling stars in Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night" may have been inspired by a telescopic image recorded in the late 1800s of the M51 nebula, a whirlpool galaxy, Mr. Benson said.

The image appeared in a publication that made its way to a mental hospital in southern France, where Van Gogh painted his iconic work in 1889.

And in 1968, astronaut William Anders on the Apollo 8 mission snapped a picture of the blue Earth seen ovesr the horizon of the moon, called "Earthrise."

"It's been called the most influential environmental photo ever taken," Mr. Benson said.

Citing 20th-century writer Italo Calvino, who wrote: "It was clear that, independent of signs, space didn't exist and perhaps had never existed," Mr. Benson said the attempt to place signs in space is a comedy doomed to fail but it's necessary to make the attempt.

"It takes us to the heart of the scientific method, the artistic method: Try again, fail again, learn," he said.

"We need to signify something for it to have meaning to us."

Contact Susan Spencer at susan.spencer@telegram.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanSpencerTG